Marital dissolution of transnational couples in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This study examines the risk of transnational divorce in Korea using marriage and divorce registration data between 2010 and 2014 from Statistics Korea. We raise two research questions. First, how does risk of marital dissolution differ by type of marriage? Second, how do the socio-demographic factors of a transnational couple affect the probability of divorce? We find that transnational marriage has an extremely high risk of divorce within the first 48 months of marriage. About 19% of marriages between a Korean husband and a foreign wife were dissolved, while only 6% of marriages between Korean nationals ended within 48 months. Both Chinese husbands and wives have the highest risk of divorce, and foreign women from Southeast Asian countries also have a substantially high risk of divorce. Another important finding is that less educated foreign wives have a significantly higher probability of divorce than foreign wives with higher education. Lastly, acquisition of citizenship lowers the risk of divorce for foreign spouses. Given the increasing number of transnational couples in Korea, this study presents the actual risk of divorce according to marriage duration for the first time and provides the most complete description of transnational marital dissolution thus far.

KEYWORDS:

• Marital dissolution
• Marital stability
• Transnational marriage
• Heterogamy hypothesis
• Sham marriage

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2017S1A3A2065967).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Ethnic Koreans in China are known as chosônjok and are the result of massive Korean emigration to China from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule.

2 The number of the 2010 marriage cohort is 325,823. We excluded foreign residents who married with foreign spouses. We also excluded individuals whose report year is earlier than 2010 or later than 2012 based on our assumption that all marriage and divorce registrations were completed within two years following the event.

3 For example, number of naturalised foreign residents whose duration of marriage was between 25–36 months divided by the total number of foreign residents whose marriage duration was between 25–36 months. Then, we apply this proportion to those in the 2010 marriage cohort whose duration of marriage was between 25–36 months.

4 We need to impute the number of divorces that occurred in 2013 but were registered in 2015 as well as the number of divorces that occurred in 2014 but were registered in 2015 or 2016. It is assumed that the 2013 and 2014 divorce cohorts have the same proportion of two-year late registrations as the 2012 divorce cohort, which is observed in our dataset. This estimation strategy is based on Park and Raymo (2013). We conduct separate analyses with the assumptions that every marriage and divorce was registered on time and that every marriage and divorce was registered within five years of the event. However, both results are found to be very similar to the assumption that marriages and divorces were registered within two years of the event.

5 The event history analysis could be a better option in terms of methodological consistency. However, constructing an event history data structure based on our variables in the model demands an extremely complex data constructing process and results in additional data loss due to the non-matching cases. We acknowledge that adoption of the logistic analysis rather than the event history analysis may be a potential limitation of the study.